will try to leave a link ... attempt www . ted. com (spaces included) ...
then search for once get to ted dot com search for ... "how not to be ignorant about the world"
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world

 

He got me!

Happens to the best of us

 

I figured he just wanted to share a bit of poetry.

 

Interesting....He posted the Robert Frost poem that my moniker is from. "I took the one less traveled". Shorted to Lestraveled. My name is actually Mark.

 

OMG! I haven't seen that book since I found it in the front seat of my boss's car in June, 1976!!!
I was merely puzzled about why his management style was so much like my sister...until I found that book.
He was trying to intimidate micro-switches from glitching when dropped on concrete and it wasn't working. LOL!

Thanks for the memories.

Guys, this thread is from 2011

(Mainly talking to plankieee here, he's the one who resurrected it with a completely unrelated post)

He got me!

Still, you comment was both welcome and entertaining.

 

Ages and Ages past, I became disenchanted on continuing to pursue Veterinary Medicine (back then they didn't have MRI's for pets, and other like tests). So, I talked to a Guidance Counselor – it was a very short meeting. The counselor scheduled me for a multiple choice preference evaluation, 5 possible answers, strongly disliked (1), disliked (2) to neutral (3), liked (4) , strongly liked (5), again this has been a long long time ago. Basically, it was about preferences, there were no right or wrong answers. I'd would guess about 200 questions, perhaps more. This also might correlated to the types of personalities, reference wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_type

There are FREE tests on the internet to “classify” you into one of these personality type categories. No link is given on this; since this it way out of my area of expertise. Anyway, from this answers a computer generated a list of more than 200 generalized occupations, rated from high correlation to low correlation based upon on my preferences; Yes, I did select one of the broad occupations that was in the top three (engineering) and perhaps personality type. Thought this might be helpful.


But the above should be taken with a grain of salt and combined with this talk below.

 

The problem with personality tests are .... would you like someone exactly like yourself as your partner or co-worker?

The immediate response typically is YES. Then upon further review, you think about your negatives and say "Hell NO."

 

Agree strongly!
M business partner of 38 years is a very different person from me and the result is that we make a great team. While we are both entirely competent and about equally educated, we think differently. We have different ways of viewing the world. Between the two of us, we have never thrown a machine in the Dumpster because we couldn't fix it.

Nobody can know everything, and nobody can please all the customers all the time, but two competent people that approach life differently can almost always please all the customers all the time. Vive la difference!

 

Personality tests suffer from several issues. One is that people tend to answer based on who they WANT to be, rather than who they are. As we age, we get better at knowing who we are. For example, ask any teenager (15-18) if they would rather manage a project vs. Do a project. You will get almost 100% saying, Manage. About 2/3 of older people say manage - and only half of those people are good at it.

An improvement could be that friends/family/teachers/coworkers answer questions for the person under test. The 360 reviews can yield interesting results.

I took an aptitude test when I was younger, I kept getting advice like, "social worker, psychologist, minister". I hate listening to peoples' problems and could not imagine sitting around talking to people all day.

 

The 360 reviews can yield interesting results.

Very true. In projects and even in performance evaluations, the perceptions of the individuals vary greatly. Believe it or not, the halo effect is prevalent.